Author Archives: Jeanne Neath

OMNI Center Claims To Be “Fair”? Apparently Lesbians and Women Don’t Count

By Jeanne Neath

In 2017 the OMNI Center in Fayetteville Arkansas and the Goddess Festival de-platformed the XX Amazons, Paula, Susan and Jeanne, preventing us from giving our workshop on “The Disappearing L – Lesbians Rise Up”. This was the result of transactivists and their supporters protesting the workshop. (See “The Story of the Goddess Festival” for details of the de-platforming and our resistance.) A few days ago I received the OMNI Center’s weekly newsletter touting itself and its members on their fairness: “You and your neighbors are right here, working our tail ends off to make the world FAIR, FREE and HEALTHY.” OMNI always advertises itself as the “Center for Peace, Justice, and Ecology.”

I find OMNI’s continued absolute favoritism toward the transgender community difficult to stomach on an ordinary day, but this kind of self-congratulatory lie coming from a group that is so unfair and unjust made me angry enough to email the OMNI director and OMNI Board of Directors the following statement.

Jeanne Neath’s Letter to the OMNI director and Board

OMNI is not doing everything it can to make the world “fair, free and healthy” (as you pretend to be at the top of your recent newsletter) when OMNI will not even allow women-only groups to meet at OMNI and you host a so-called Goddess Festival that silences and excludes radical feminist voices. OMNI has taken sides in the conflict between transactivists vs lesbians and all the many women who want and need women only space. This is an incredibly unfair position.

I don’t think the OMNI board has a clue as to what a woman hating and lesbian hating position it has taken (or if they do understand, then I am even more appalled at OMNI’s behavior). I suggest that OMNI educate itself on the harm that transactivists and their supporters are creating or at least stop pretending to “work its tail off” to make the world fair. Women only space is an essential prerequisite for a women’s liberation movement to exist. OMNI is acting to prevent the liberation of women and at the same time pretending to be fair. Pretty appalling!

Lesbians attacked at 2018 San Francisco Dyke March.

For starters, I suggest you inform yourselves about the attacks by transactivists on lesbians at the 2018 San Francisco Dyke March. (See the accompanying image showing what happened to a lesbian’s sign at the SF Dyke March which said “You can’t silence us with violence. Resist Lesbian Erasure.”) I also suggest reading the blogs (including one about the SF Dyke March) and other materials on xxamazons.org, reading relevant materials on feministcurrent.com, and reading the book Female Erasure, edited by Ruth Barrett and now available at the Fayetteville Public Library. There is no excuse for OMNI Board members to be informed only by the transactivist political perspective!

I don’t particularly want to hear back from you about this correspondence until OMNI is prepared to start making things right in its policies and practices toward women. I would appreciate an invitation for women’s groups to once again be able to hold women-only events at OMNI (and women-only means no “transwomen”). I am still waiting for a real apology from OMNI regarding the events around the 2017 Goddess Festival.”

Jeanne Neath, Former OMNI Board Member

OMNI Director Responds

The director of the OMNI Center responded in a semi-private, personal email to me saying only that she was sorry I was badly hurt. This was not an official OMNI response. I have no idea if the OMNI Board of Directors will even read or discuss my communication to them or respond in any way.

However, members of a local group of women who are resisting transactivist domination and fighting for women only space jumped into the fray with their own comments to the OMNI director.

Darlene Clubb writes to the OMNI director

What kind of response is this? This is a dismissal in my opinion. Please do not lay this at Jeanne’s feet like she is some isolated, wounded individual. From where I stand, OMNI has totally been positioning itself in support of the trans view of reality and appears to have dropped all pretense of concern or interest in the issues raised by lifelong lesbians and radical feminists concerning serious violence against women and the destruction of women’s legal standing/rights that the trans ideology poses. Billionaires are funding the trans agenda. Billionaires from corporate, pharmaceutical dynasties are funding think tanks that are designing and coordinating this homophobic and misogynistic social engineering project that is having devastating effects on lesbians and women’s very basic concerns in general (such as the ownership of the legal term “woman”, issues concerning birth and midwifery, menstruation,etc.)

Paula Mariedaughter’s comments to the OMNI director

Your crass dismissal of Jeanne’s concerns is an indication of your own loyalties. The war on women includes the war on women only spaces! Omni is a collaborator in the efforts to silence women and our strong political differences with all of you so ready to redefine woman.

In Female Erasure, edited by Ruth Barrett, she wrote, “Political disagreement is an opportunity for discourse that is part of a free society, and should be encouraged. When any questions or concerns are written off as hate speech, bigotry or ‘transphobia’, discourse cannot take place.” This is the situation here in Fayetteville, Arkansas where your “fair-minded” organization refuses to sponsor any opportunity for discourse that differs from your political decision to support trans activist’s version of reality.

“As part of the conservative backlash, segments of the left have shifted away from political and structural analysis of oppression and injustice, towards an individualistic politics whose primary demand is for the recognition and validation of individual identities. Gender becomes an identity based on an internal set of feelings that must be believed and accepted without question, and that is unrelated to biological sex. They claim that one set of traits is inherently masculine and another set of traits is inherently feminine, and our identity is dependent on how we align with those traits. Gender identity is seen as innate, and being transgender is entirely a matter of self‑identification. They do not see gender in our patriarchal society as a hierarchical construct of a male supremacy.” This is a quote from Pelican Lee written on the XX Amazons website.

We will not be silenced by the exclusions and expulsions and the threats. Women and girls, our children and our grandchildren are depending on us women!

Linda Barnes writes to the OMNI director

The fact that we are even having to discuss who is a woman is really unbelievable to me. A man can never be a woman and vice versa. We know that is biologically impossible. The confusion seems to be with the word sex and gender. A person may change their appearance to look like a woman (in some cases) because society says a woman should look and dress a certain way and men should look and dress a certain way, but that is not sex, that is gender straitjacketing. We know from the beginning of time there was a man and a woman because otherwise there would not have been anyone else. So we know there are two sexes, but race has been a social construct, yet when Rachel Dolezal tried to present herself as a black person and was found out to be white, she was removed from her job and highly criticized for trying to cross a racial barrier. And, yes, blacks have been and still are an oppressed race, but women have been oppressed and held back and their long history of matriarchy almost erased from history. The black man got the vote before women did. And yet the left and the many trans sympathizers seem to have no problem with men saying they are women. Yes, let them go into women’s bathrooms and changing areas, even though most of them still have penises. They are now trying to develop uteri to implant into male bodies so they can have children. The midwifery is eliminating mother from their vocabulary and using birthing parent instead. Have you read “Female Erasure”?

The Disappearing L Here is a quote from Jenn Smith, a male to trans person, “It is my contention that young people today are being brainwashed and turned into Orwellian servants of the state for a much larger agenda. It has been suggested by others that the assault on sexual distinctions and on the perception of basic biological reality is part of a game to give absolute power to the state in the interpretation of reality itself. If the state can force people to admit that men are women, they can force them to believe anything. War is peace. Slavery is freedom. Men are women. All of these are equally contradictory.” I truly believe there is much more to this trans movement than we know and it is really scary. Have you questioned how this has come about so fast and tracked down where the money is coming from? Many lesbians and gays feel that the T should be removed from LGBT because they are just out for themselves and care nothing about gays or lesbians, except to try to force lesbians to have sex with the male to trans so they can feel more validated.

I think you and Omni are going to be on the wrong side of history when this mess gets straightened out. When people try to change the very definition of half of the world’s inhabitants then they are trying to distort reality itself. If the trans people had really wanted to be non-controversial they should have called themselves what Ruth Barrett suggested, “gender non-conforming men, a no less sacred expression of humanity.

Jeanne Neath Sends a Second Communication to OMNI

After reflecting on the OMNI director’s condescending response and the obvious ignorance of the OMNI Board about gender critical thought, I decided to send a second communication in an attempt to educate the OMNI leaders about just how deadly the transgender ideology they are supporting is.

Jeanne’s second communication to the OMNI Director and OMNI Board:
Everyone – women, lesbians, “transgender” people, OMNI, you and me – is being seriously harmed by the misunderstandings about sex and gender that transactivists are proclaiming as a truth that no one is allowed to question. OMNI is not doing itself, or anyone else, including “transgender” people, a kindness by unthinkingly subscribing to an inaccurate view of reality AND silencing the women who have legitimate criticisms of the transactivist position on sex and gender. What does it mean for OMNI and you, its director, an organization and woman concerned about justice, about “fairness”, to take sides in a conflict between oppressed groups and act to silence lesbians, radical feminists and me, a former OMNI board member with over forty years of experience as a feminist activist investigating the problem of sex and gender in patriarchal society? Every day you and OMNI continue on this misogynist path you are on and then congratulate yourselves on how “fair” and just you are, you stray further and further from your mission of “justice.”

“Gender,” the sex-typed behaviors and characteristics society trains males and females to perform, is constructed by society. The behaviors considered masculine and feminine change over time within a society. Do you think that girls were showered with pink clothes and toys one or two hundred years ago in this society? Gender is set up differently in different societies around the world too. The transgender movement is built around the notion that people have an innate, biological “gender identity,” but this is impossible because what is masculine and feminine is set up by each society. Do you think that our foremothers living in gathering and hunting societies over the millenia prior to the development of agriculture wore pink? But, more important, do you think OMNI should be silencing women who want to talk about gender and the ways that patriarchal societies use gender to maintain male power over women?

People who identify as “transgender” are being terribly hurt by their own movement and ideology. Feminists have fought for decades to eliminate the constrictions of gender for everyone. Since gender has been created by society, society has the power to do away with gender and free girls and boys, men and women from being forced into harmful sex roles. But, transgender ideology insists that gender (and “gender identity”) is not changeable and that, instead of changing (eliminating) the social institution of gender, the people who are unhappy with the gender prescribed for their biological sex must become transgender. This would not be problematic – many lesbians, for example, identify as butch and act in so-called masculine ways – but the transgender movement advocates changing one’s body to correspond to (socially constructed) gender (as well as confusing sex and gender and appropriating – stealing – the identity of being a woman). Because trans ideology is supported by progressive organizations like OMNI, by powerful national non-profit organizations like the Human Rights Campaign, and by obscenely wealthy individuals, many of whom are tied to the pharmaceutical industry, being transgender has become “cool” and more and more children and young people are identifying as transgender, especially girls and young women. Many of these children and young people are taking hormone blockers and hormones and having irreversible surgeries to remove breasts, testicles and to reshape genitals. Children are being sterilized and given off label drugs with unknown long-term effects. When OMNI supports the transgender movement and silences lesbians, silences radical feminists, silences me, OMNI supports all of these dangerous, often irreversible medical treatments and the sterilization of children, children who probably would outgrow their desire to become “transgender” (a likelihood demonstrated by the scientific evidence).

______, you were seriously off-track in your comment about being sorry I am (supposedly) hurting so badly. Stop trying to dismiss my concerns! OMNI took a serious wrong turn when it bowed to pressures by transactivists and their supporters to de-platform Susan, Paula and me at the 2017 Goddess Festival for our workshop on the “Disappearing L – Lesbians Rise Up”. Your attempt to have a “dialogue” group to bring transgender people and gender critical women into discussion was deeply biased from the start when you selected two trans supporters who were completely ignorant of gender critical thought as moderators. I am asking the OMNI director and OMNI board members to educate yourselves about gender critical/radical feminist perspectives and to make reparations to the women and lesbians you have silenced. Making space at OMNI for women to hold publicized women-only events (that exclude “transwomen”) is a necessary part of these reparations. I, personally, would like a real apology from OMNI once your organization has educated itself enough to understand the great harm you have done to women, to lesbians, to the people who identify as transgender, and to everyone else who is being harmed day in and day out by the pressures to conform to “gender” prescriptions

Conclusion

I am proud of all the women in northwest Arkansas and at XX Amazons who are resisting the silencing of women, transgender ideology, and transactivist attacks. We stand together fighting these patriarchal forces attempting to control women.

Domination by Trans Rights Activists at Dyke March in San Fransciso

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By Jeanne Neath

Twelve old lesbians marching in the June 23, 2018 San Francisco Dyke March were verbally harassed and two of them physically assaulted by transgender rights supporters. Instead of supporting the lesbians being harassed, both the Dyke March and the National Center for Lesbian Rights are falsely claiming that the old lesbians were the ones acting in a threatening and violent manner. As I understand it, the dyke marches across the country have been largely taken over by persons who are not lesbians. How has this happened?

Bats carried by transactivist group at marches

Bats carried at marches by the Degenderettes, an international transactivist group active in San Francisco. Local chapters of the Degenderettes are forming.

In her XX Amazons’ blog last week, Paula Mariedaughter described how “Lesbians [are] Not Welcome at a Women’s Center started by Lesbian Feminists.” That unnamed women’s center in Fayetteville, Arkansas is under the spell of lesbian trans supporters who have abandoned lesbian feminist politics in favor of the transgender politics of so-called “inclusion.”

So far, the board of directors there is all female and may be all lesbian. Some board members support women only space, but are unable to allow women only events due to the power of the trans supporting faction (and the fear of attack on the center by transactivists and their liberal, progressive, and “feminist” supporters). It looks to me like the Fayetteville center is in the early stages of losing its female and lesbian identity and sliding into trans domination. If they are successful in becoming increasingly “inclusive” it may just be a matter of time until lesbians who value women only space are purposefully excluded from the board and a male to transgender person is invited to join the board. Read Paula’s blog for more details of the situation there.

I believe this process of liberal lesbian trans supporters gaining increasing sway over a lesbian organization, adopting a policy and politics of “inclusion”, welcoming transgender persons into the organization, and, finally, welcoming male to transgender persons who claim to be lesbians onto the board of directors has become commonplace. Once this process has been completed, what was once a lesbian organization begins to put the interests of transactivists front and center. If the lesbian organization is considered a valuable enough target, powerful forces from outside the organization may become involved, perhaps training transactivists to infiltrate the organization’s board, providing advice on strategy, or supplying funding.** Some are calling this kind of trans takeover a “transjacking”. Whoops, there goes another piece of our once thriving lesbian culture!

Male to transgender persons are not only appropriating our identity as women, but are stealing our organizations.

Male to transgender persons are not only appropriating our identity as women, but are stealing our organizations. Many women and lesbians are doing our best to stop these thefts. Awareness of what is transpiring is a key part of our resistance.

We offer below links to several personal accounts by lesbians of what happened to them at the San Francisco Dyke March, the Women’s Liberation Front’s (WOLF’s) open letter to the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and a link to a Change.org petition from one of the women whose sign was torn up by the trans rights activists at the San Francisco Dyke March (see photo below).

WOLF’s open letter to the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) demands that the organization retract its slanderous and false allegations against the 12 lesbians who were harassed at the 2018 San Francisco Dyke March. In a classic reversal, “demonstrating a stunning degree of anti-lesbian bias”, NCLR falsely claimed that the lesbian marchers had “chanted transphobic slogans and violently harassed and threatened other marchers.”

See Max Dashu’s account of what happened at the San Francisco Dyke March. Max Dashu writes: “All of the old lesbians in our group were quickly surrounded, subjected to chants of “TERFs go home!” and blasted with hatefulness for the entire course of the march. Young queers berated, hounded, and crowded in on us. Most of them refused to speak with us, only glaring, chanting, and screaming.”

In “Young Women Attack Dykes their Grandma’s Age” Lavenderjoan writes: “It was a nightmare scenario. Imagine the Lavender Menace meets Lord of the Flies. Twenty-something participants in the Dyke March swooped down on our small contingent of old lesbians like crazed predators thirsty for blood…”

Here is Sherri Golden’s petition calling for The San Francisco Dyke March, the National Center for Lesbian Rights and the Bay Area Reporter to retract their “defamatory and libelous statements” claiming that the lesbian victims of threatening and violent behaviors by trans rights activists were instead the attackers. See Sherri Golden and what happened to the sign she carried saying “You can’t silence us with violence – Resist lesbian erasure” in the photo below.

Lesbians attacked at 2018 San Francisco Dyke March.

By Jeanne Neath

** Interview with Mary Lou Singleton, Women’s Liberation Radio News Edition 16 transcript

** Sue Donym, Inauthentic Selves: The modern LGBTQ+ Movement Is Run By Philanthropic Astroturf And Based On Junk Science

Women Giving, Males Taking: Who Thinks This Is A Gender Revolution?

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“However patriarchies began originally, they are recreated in every male child that is born because of our practice of educating boys into a gender category opposite to that of their mothers, even at a time when mothers are intensely practicing gift-giving towards their children. Then mothers, as well as their girl children, adapt to care especially for boys who are learning to be non-giving human beings. But, actually gift giving is the basis of our humanity – men’s as well – so this gender distinction sets up some basic, important, and pervasive paradoxes that influence our lives at all levels, and which are at the root of patriarchy and capitalism.”
By Genevieve Vaughan¹

Thinking about gender in terms of giving and non-giving provides considerable insight into the conflict between feminists and transactivists.

Radical feminists often think of gender as the institution in patriarchy that trains males to become dominators/exploiters and females to submit to domination. I agree. If you think about some of the characteristics associated with masculinity such as aggressiveness and competition its easy to see how these qualities are important for carrying out acts of domination and exploitation. And feminine qualities like being nice and agreeable certainly predispose girls and women to submit to domination. These feminine qualities are often instilled in girl children through abuse by men and boys.

However, a critical part of femininity and women’s role in society is as mothers and, even if never bearing or raising children, girls are trained to have the skills needed by mothers including gift-giving, nurturing, and care-giving. Patriarchal societies depend on women to give birth and mother children, but patriarchy always exploits women’s work, including women’s care-giving. Gift-giving is, nonetheless, crucial for human societies, as Genevieve Vaughan says, “the basis of our humanity.” No society, including this capitalist patriarchy, can survive without an active subsistence economy based in gift-giving, cooperation and care. (See footnote 2 for more on the subsistence economy.)

Matriarchal societies take women’s role as mother as the model for all human behavior, so in matriarchies both female and male children are taught to give, not to take. Not so in patriarchy. Genevieve Vaughan views gender in patriarchy through a lens of gift-giving (feminine) vs. non-giving (masculine). Given all the exploitation carried out largely by men in our current society, I think it is instructive to think of the “non-giving” Genevieve Vaughan associates with masculinity as taking.

Male to transgender (M2T) persons claim to have a feminine gender identity. But, are they givers or takers?

These tiny offering vessels were made of clay by human hands about 3,600 years ago. Each of the bowls filled with food was left as a gift to the great mother. The bowls were found in caves, mountain top crevices, by springs and other places sacred to the ancient peoples of Crete, the largest of the Greek islands. The bowls were photographed by Paula at the Heraklion Archeological Museum in Heraklion, the capital city of Crete in October 2017.

Women are constantly called on in our daily lives to provide emotional support for others – often men. We give up time for ourselves to focus on the needs of the people we care about. We spend endless time listening to other people’s concerns and problems. Men are often so emotionally unskilled that they are completely dependent on women’s help in finding ways of handling their own emotions or any emotionally difficult situation.

I wonder how many M2T (male to transgender) persons have taken on the feminine role of giving emotional support to others. I am thinking about this question after reading an experience described by Carey Maria Catt Callahan (a biological female) when she was first considering de-transitioning and couldn’t find any de-transitioned women to talk to. She tried to get support from a M2T friend (referred to in the quote below as “she” and as a “woman”):

“I told a trans woman friend of mine this, a woman I’d lent money to and talked down from suicidal threats, and she laughed. It was clear to me, regardless of an internal felt sense of gendered self, I’d done the caretaking work in the friendship and she couldn’t even conceive of herself as owing me same in return.” (See footnote 3.)

In this patriarchal society boys and men are given center stage and they have a lot of self-centeredness, privilege and even selfishness to overcome if they want to learn to be care-givers.

Recently I’ve started telling people that “woman is an identity that is already taken.” What does it mean for one oppressed group to claim the identity of another oppressed group? I’m not sure this has ever happened before. Certainly cultural appropriation is a big problem when, for example, white people start taking over Native American spiritual practices without permission. But M2T persons appropriate (take over) the actual identity of being a woman. As XX Amazons says in our “Who Is a Woman? Who Gets to Decide?” brochure:

“Today male to transgender persons are claiming to be women but they have never asked whether or not women want them. They want to be considered women regardless of how many women object. Where is their respect for women?”

Which gender role are M2T persons acting out when they take what belongs to women?

I was one of the lesbians de-platformed by transactivists at the Goddess Festival in March of 2017. I have to say that what I experienced from transactivists at that time – the unrelenting Facebook, phone, and email campaign, threats of picketing and invading our workshop – in no way resembled any form of giving. I certainly experienced caregiving and support from lesbians and other feminist friends. But, transactivists, both M2T and F2T persons, did everything they could to take from me my rights to speak in public and meet with other women.

M2T persons not only want to take women’s identities, they want to take from women our ability to speak about our experiences and understandings. They want to take away from us and take over for themselves the narrative of what it means to be a woman. I have heard from a reliable source that transactivists once wrote “Real Women Have Dicks” in large letters on the outside of a public tent at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, so I guess that is their narrative for “Who Is a Woman?” According to this version of reality we women no longer qualify as women!

M2T persons do not seem to be very good at giving, at performing the most basic acts associated with the feminine gender identity they claim.

Radical feminists are resisting the attacks of the TEAFS (Transactivist Extremists Attacking Feminists) and fighting for women and girls. But what of the other women, including many mainstream feminists, who are far more concerned with supporting transactivists than they are with the pain experienced by their sisters who are under attack from those same transactivists?

There are probably many reasons for the ways that trans-supporters prioritize M2T (male to transgender) needs, but why not look at their actions in terms of giving and taking? If there is one form of caregiving that women are most programmed to do in patriarchy, I expect that would be taking care of men. Many women so prioritize taking care of men that they fail to take care of their own needs.

What males could need women’s caretaking more than M2T persons? Just like other males, many M2T persons are emotionally unskilled. Many of them are experiencing gender dysphoria and gender (or gender identity) confusion, as well as emotional difficulties or crisis. They experience prejudice and discrimination on a daily basis.

Usually liberation movements are able to help their members grow strong as they fight for their group and learn to embrace their authentic selves. This strengthening process could work for transgender people, but cannot while the transgender movement pushes its members to falsely claim more than the transgender identity they have clear rights to. When males claim to be women or females claim to be men they become trapped in an endless pursuit of an identity can never have because they have the wrong biology. The result is a needy, shaky, inauthentic self forced to constantly perform a role and desperate for external validation.

Enter all the female caregivers drawn to help a movement full of males who need help and can’t give each other the help they need because of their socialization as “non-givers.” Many women trans-supporters empathize so strongly with transgender people that they put transgender personal and political needs ahead of women’s needs. They collude to end women-only and girl-only spaces because they don’t want to hurt the feelings of M2T persons by excluding them. I know feminist women who understand that M2T persons are “non-givers,” but want to invite M2T persons into women-only groups in order to teach them how to act like women – to stop dominating meetings, to stop being self-centered, to learn to be care-givers. Seriously! How could radical feminists, with our strong authentic selves, no matter how assaulted we are by TEAFs, even begin to compete for the care and concern of the women who give too much to males!

The irony here is that radical feminists offer an important gift to male and female transgender persons. We radical feminists understand that gender is a patriarchal trap. We know that nobody is naturally “masculine” or “feminine.” Males have to be forced into adopting “masculinity”, females forced into “femininity”. Transgender people try to find their way out of this gender trap by switching roles, but following any gender role prevents free self-expression. Transgender people become stuck trying to perform a gender role they weren’t even trained for. Gender roles were created by patriarchal society for the purpose of controlling women for the benefit of men (especially elite white men). The gift radical feminists offer to transgender people is the understanding that gender has been purposefully constructed by patriarchal society and that this deadly institution of gender can be just as purposefully dismantled.

Feminists and transgender people have a common enemy – gender!

Who has more to offer gender-confused and transgender people: their “yes-woman” supporters or the radical feminists whose critique of the transgender worldview offers a life-affirming path out of the gender maze?

Footnotes

1. From Genevieve Vaughan’s article, “Matriarchy and the Gift Economy,” in Societies of Peace: Matriarchies Past Present and Future edited by Heide Goettner-Abendroth.

2. For many societies, including most matriarchies and tribal societies, the subsistence economy – based in production that has only the goal of creating, re-creating and maintaining life – is the only economy. Capitalist patriarchy has installed an exploitative market economy on top of the core, gift-giving, subsistence economy. The capitalist economy would quickly falter and fail without all the work women give for free bearing and raising children, caring for households and men. See Maria Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen’s book The Subsistence Perspective.

3. From Carey Maria Catt Callahan article, “Unheard Voices of Detransitioners,” in Transgender Children and Young People: Born in Your Own Body edited by Heather Brunskell-Evans and Michele Moore, p. 169.